Midway through a recent Zoom interview with Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian director of “Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” he offered a glimpse into his creative process. He pulled out one of the books he was reading, an illustrated tome on commedia dell'arte. He then shared his screen to reveal a collection of texts and images (Van Gogh still lifes, Giacometti sculptures, Japanese haikus) saved in folders on his computer. Jude stopped looking at a photo he took of a sign posted at the entrance to an apartment building.
“It says 'Please have oral sex so you don't disturb the other tenants,'” Jude explained, translating from Romanian with a smile on his face.
The self-taught Jude does not leave aside dirty jokes. His work combines tragedy and farce, drawing promiscuously on art, literature, street advertisements and social media to fuel his unabashed visions of Romanian history and contemporary life.
Jude's previous Golden Bear-winning film, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” begins with the making of a humorously sloppy sex tape and concludes with a witchcraft trial against one of the film's participants. His latest work, “Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” hits U.S. theaters on Friday.
The dark comedy follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, ferrying clients and equipment around Bucharest, the capital of Romania. One of Angela's jobs involves interviewing former factory employees who were injured on the job for a chance to appear in a corporate safety video. Scenes from the present, shot in black and white, are intertwined with colorful clips of another woman named Angela: a taxi driver from the 80s also chained to a thankless job that involves driving through the streets of Bucharest.
Jude, 46, was born and raised in Bucharest and lived through the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. After graduating from film school, he got his start in the Romanian film industry in the early 2000s, directing commercials and corporate films. Exploitation on these sets was widespread, Jude recalled.
“Romania was a haven for international productions from around the world because of the cheap locations and labor,” he said: Ridiculously long hours were expected. “At the time I thought it was romantic and part of film mythology,” Jude added. “Then I remember hearing about a guy who was forced to work without sleep: 'Just one more coke, one more Red Bull.'” The man eventually died in a car accident.
Manolache said Jude directed him to watch Andy Warhol films and Nico's performances on “The Velvet Underground” to infuse a punk energy into his gig-economy workhorse. The character's sequin dress and constant gum-chewing help give off this mischievous vibe, but her outlaw behavior comes through most strongly when she plays Bobita, an online alter ego that Manolache created independently of the film, but that appears in frantic outbursts. throughout it.
Bobita is summoned when Angela posts videos of herself with a filter resembling Andrew Tate, the online personality currently facing extradition from Romania on sex crime charges, and performs vulgar monologues that appear to mock the influencer's misogynistic speeches. . Manolache said she hadn't heard of Tate when she first debuted the Bobita character on social media in 2021, and was actually inspired by Miranda July's performances on Instagram and her own frustrations with the culture of toxic masculinity. from Romania. Although some of her family and colleagues despised Bobita, Manolache said, Jude was a fan of her sordid satire and invited her to star in her new film.
“Most big artists don't see the value of TikTok,” Manolache said. “They reject it and call it a strange subculture. “That's what's weird about Radu and what makes him such a modern voice.”
During the Zoom, Jude pulled out his phone and presented his TikTok feed to the camera. It showed an elderly woman doing an exercise routine and then a chicken that had reportedly survived a dog attack. “They have a certain beauty,” he said. “Here you can see people and places that you don't usually find in Romanian cinema. Why don't they appear in the movies? Many times I feel that cinema is behind TikTok. He is not familiar with these expressions of life.”
For much of his career, beginning with his 2009 feature film debut, “The Happiest Girl in the World,” about a provincial teenager who is forced to participate in a soft drink commercial, Jude was considered part of the “new wave.” Romanian” of filmmakers. united by the social-realist perspectives of himself and his working-class subjects. Although several Romanian New Wave directors (such as Cristian Mungiu and Cristi Puiu) emerged as film festival heavyweights in the mid-2000s, Jude only gained international recognition in 2015, when he won an award at the Film Festival. Berlin cinema for its 19th century picaresque. , “Aferim!”
Dorota Lech, a Central and Eastern European film programmer at the Toronto Film Festival, said the “New Wave” label has become outdated. Still, Jude's constant reinvention, she added, makes him a filmmaker too dynamic to fit into a single box. “He is a true artist in a sea of paint-by-numbers content creators,” Lech said via email. He “can be rude,” she added, “but he can also go toe-to-toe with anyone on any topic.”
Some critics have drawn parallels between Jude and French author Jean-Luc Godard (another fiercely political artist who played with the tools of new media), but Jude was shy of the comparison.
He admitted that, like Godard, he grew tired of “discovering beauty in all kinds of images” (although he noted that Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and John Dos Passos did too) and added that he plans to shoot his next film on an iPhone precisely. because the format is considered uglier.
“When you read a history book you only retain some traces or details. This is how cinema works. Suddenly, the details jump out and become cinematic. An Instagram page can be cinematic. A reflection in a puddle. It is necessary to force cinema to take new directions, make it impure and spoil it in order to see these small details.”
“I'm just drawing attention to what's there,” he said. “Maybe that means I'm not a serious filmmaker.”
In fact, several of Jude's films (like his next feature, an adaptation of Dracula) began as jokes. “He was presenting a new project to some producers and they were not enthusiastic. So I said to one of them, 'Well, I'm from Transylvania, so I have a Dracula project too,' which I didn't do. Suddenly, he became very interested.” Then, unsurprisingly, considering Jude's free, improvisational spirit, he thought, “Why not?”
